Open Source Cloud Interoperability

The momentum in technology often picks up when developers converge to create Open Source solutions that can be used to solve interoperability issues. Arguably this is not required to be Open Source but I am of the mind that something magical happens when Open Source is the catalyst (e.g. "The Internet" Boom after the proprietary PC market had to contend with Linux...). When Open Source has the backing of an organization that is built around prospering with it the "stars begin to align".

Now the hat to make people blush for having talked about this yet done nothing has been thrown into the mix with an Open Source cloud interoperability solution.

RedHat has just announced DeltaCloud and "The goal is simple. To enable an ecosystem of developers, tools, scripts, and applications which can interoperate across the public and private clouds." http://press.redhat.com/2009/09/03/introducing-deltacloud/

http://deltacloud.org/

Start an instance on an internal cloud, then with the same code start another on EC2 or Rackspace. Deltacloud protects your apps from cloud API changes and incompatibilities, so you can concentrate on managing cloud instances the way you want.

Deltacloud gives you:

• REST API (simple, any-platform access)
• Support for EC2, RHEV-M; VMWare ESX, RackSpace coming soon
• Backward compatibility across versions, providing long-term stability for scripts, tools and applications

One level up, Deltacloud Portal provides a web UI in front of the Deltacloud API. With Deltacloud Portal, your users can:

• View image status and stats across clouds, all in one place
• Migrate instances from one cloud to another
• Manage images locally and provision them on any cloud

I am interested to see how Microsoft Azure responds (if at all) http://www.microsoft.com/azure/default.mspx

This is not the first one but I believe it to be another big push for cloud computing.

/*
Joe Stein
http://www.linkedin.com/in/charmalloc
*/